Tuesday, 7 October 2014

Trail of Cthulhu: Bookhounds of London: Ned Kelly's Skull

This post is inspired by a recent article concerning the fate of Australian bandit and folk hero Edward 'Ned' Kelly. I'm not going to recount Kelly's biography here - that's what Wikipedia's for - but, in brief, Kelly, after several minor brushes with the law, escalated to murdering policemen sent to arrest him, and started robbing banks. Their most memorable, and final, encounter was at the small town of Glenrowan, near Victoria, where Kelly and his friends, dressed in bullet-repelling armor, captured the entire town, thinking that police were due to arrive by train and that, if the gang acted quickly, they could derail that train. The pursuers were warned by a constable named Curnow before they reached the ambush point, and surrounded the gang at Mrs Jones' hotel, where Kelly and his men lay in wait along with most of the captured townsfolk. The resultant siege was bloody and violent, eventually ending when the hotel burnt down, but Kelly was taken hours before that. He'd been shot several times in the lower body, including once in the groin, but his armor protected his upper body and head. Kelly was hanged on November 11th, 1880.

Though the authorities tried to deny it, Kelly's body was taken for dissection, and his skull allegedly was given to phrenologists to examine, before being returned to the police who used it as a paperweight. The bodies of Kelly and his associates were exhumed in 1929 when building works took place at the gaol, and a skull alleged to be Kelly's was retrieved. However it's since been shown that the 1929 skull did not, in fact, belong to Kelly, which means it must have gone missing some time before. Nowadays there are several people who claim to have it, including a self-proclaimed witch. It might have been carried off by phrenologists, or it might have been buried somewhere else. Interestingly, the skull that was recovered in 1929 - and stolen in the 1970s, only to be returned in 2009 - probably belongs to Frederick Bailey Deeming, once thought to be a likely Jack the Ripper candidate.

From a Bookhounds perspective, there are at least three contemporary books that might turn up in London:

Sadlier, John, Recollections of a Victorian Police Officer, (1913)
Kenneally, J. J. The Inner History of the Kelly Gang, (1929) Hare, Francis
Augustus, The
Last of the Bushrangers: An account of the capture of the Kelly Gang(1894)In addition to these books there would have been scores of Kelly artifacts, from photographs to bits of armor and guns. Many of these - like the revolver belonging to one of Kelly's early targets, constable Fitzpatrick, which sold for $70,000 at auction in 2007 - are probably fakes.With all that in mind, consider the following Trail (Tale) of Terror:A bottom-feeding Book Scout, David / Dolores Veles, is working on behalf of an as yet unknown client, and is making a nuisance of himself. Veles is after Kelly memorabilia of any sort, but is particularly interested in three books, each of them ex libris Francis Brevor, an occultist and self-proclaimed Satanist who committed suicide in 1930. According to Veles, Brevor had copies of Sadlier, Kenneally and Hare's works, as well as a mysterious 'fourth item' which Veles is very reluctant to describe, but for which Veles is prepared to pay an astronomical sum. The fourth item, kept in a special oak box, is Ned Kelly's skull, which Brevor supposedly took from a phrenologist enemy in 1896. Nobody knows where the fourth item is, though Veles suspects that annotations in the three books from Brevor's library might hold the key.

1. Veles is working on behalf of a particularly ghoulish client, who wants to grind Kelly's skull to powder and ingest it, in a potion of his own concoction. He thinks he will consume Kelly's essence that way, gaining special powers as a result. However the skull, it transpires, isn't Kelly's at all, and the client will be most upset at this deception. The client won't believe Veles when he protests he knows nothing about the fraud, and he probably won't believe the protagonists either.

2. The skull was brought out to London by a phrenologist who believed he was actually stealing Deeming's remains. He intended to use the skull as part of a ritual to evoke Jack the Ripper, which spirit he intended to use as part of a long-running scheme to reopen the Eye of Byatis (see further Whitechapel Black Letter, in the main book). When he discovered the skull was actually Kelly's he was most upset, and sold it to Brevor, an expatriate Australian for whom it had sentimental value. The problem is, the phrenologist's botched Byatis ritual has inadvertently linked Kelly's ghost to the Eye, causing the skull to be a kind of focal point, leeching London's malignant spirit and causing whoever might be its current owner no end of trouble. Veles' client has heard of this Byatis artifact and thinks it can help him in his own studies, but nothing could be further from the truth, as Kelly's twisted ghost will be only too happy to demonstrate. 3. Veles is actually working for Brevor, who's been dead for years. Except not really; Brevor faked his death to escape immolation at the hands of a particularly powerful rival. Now Brevor thinks he has a chance to revenge himself against his enemy and lure him into a trap. But first, the bait: Kelly's skull, which Brevor claimed, untruthfully, had special powers. With Veles out there spreading rumors and buying up Kelly artifacts, Brevor thinks it's only a matter of time before his rival shows up in person, eager to get that skull. Then the fun will begin! Of course, some innocent Bookhounds might get caught in the crossfire, but who cares about them?